Most of recently developed voice recognition devices and voice recognition systems are intended for unspecified speakers, and it is therefore unnecessary for a user to register his or her voices which the user wants a voice recognition device or a voice recognition system to recognize into the equipment beforehand. More specifically, instead of uttering a voice, the user can register his or her voice which the user wants the voice recognition device or system to recognize into the equipment by simply inputting kana characters from a keyboard or the like in the case of Japanese. Furthermore, also in the case of a foreign language, by simply allowing the user to input a word which the user wants the voice recognition device or system to recognize into the equipment, the conventional voice recognition device or system can create a phonetic symbol of the word automatically, and register the word as a recognition object word.
However, there is a case in which the user registers his or her uttered voice into the voice recognition device or system to use the word as a recognition object word, depending on an application to which voice recognition is applied (this case will be referred to as creation of a user dictionary from here on). For example, there are a case in which the user registers a radio station name corresponding to the frequency of a radio station by voice, and a case in which the user registers the name of a person or a place name corresponding to a telephone number by voice.
Furthermore, voice recognition mounted in equipment, such as a car navigation or a mobile terminal, which is used over a plurality of countries requires a function of switching among languages. In general, invoice recognition, voice data are collected for each language, and a voice uttered by a user is recognized by using a recognition algorithm and a sound standard model which are constructed using the data. Switching among languages requires switching among voice recognition units and switching among sound standard models.
In an application as mentioned above which registers a voice uttered by a user and uses this voice as a recognition object, because each created user dictionary depends on a voice recognition algorithm and a sound standard model, when switching among voice recognition units and switching among sound standard models are done in order to switch among languages, the user needs to perform an operation of registering his or her voices again because some already-created user dictionaries cannot be used.
To solve this problem, conventionally, some measures have been provided. For example, patent reference 1 discloses electronic dictionary equipment for and an electronic dictionary equipment using language switching method of determining a language which a user wants to use by comparing a voice uttered by the user with words stored in the system when switching among using languages for an electronic dictionary, and a storage medium used for the electronic dictionary equipment. Furthermore, patent reference 2 discloses a mobile terminal device for and a computer program for determining a language which a user wants to use by comparing a voice uttered by the user with words stored in the system when switching among using languages for an electronic dictionary.
[Related Art Document]
    Patent Reference    Patent reference 1: JP,2001-282788,A    Patent reference 2: JP,2002-247646,A